[Apotheos]

I know we dumped AMP at The Daily Beast because revenue per page view went down significantly enough to negate any supposed benefits of using it.

If I remember correctly pageviews didn't increase when we used it, which was the idea as google would rank us higher.

[tootie]

My news site dumped AMP late last year also. We were doing a replatform and just didn't carry it over. Didn't see any appreciable changes in traffic or user behavior.

[ec109685]

Problem with turning off AMP, it’s generally replaced with a page with even more ads, so the user suffers in that aspect.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Ads themselves aren't the core problem. It's the 10's of megabytes of superfluous javascript you're expected to download to read content with primarily text presentation. Put the marketing departments on the ark ship along with the telephone sanitizers and we'll all be better off.

[samizdis]

> Put the marketing departments on the ark ship along with the telephone sanitizers and we'll all be better off.

... but we'll still have nice-looking hair :)

[hammyhavoc]

You don't just hit the 'reader' button/mode in your browser?

[kevin_thibedeau]

I block most javascript by default for a nicer 90's style web experience but there are times when I'm using a browser without addons or reader mode available. This is far faster than the supposed streamlining that AMP was claimed to provide. The most hostile web sites I encounter are the AMP pages on the Google assistant news feed.

[h3mb3]

But a lot of that JS is for ads and tracking/analytics, the latter of which also ties into ads and marketing.

[oliwarner]

AMP never limited you from doing all that; it's just the method that is tweaked.

In my experience if a publisher chooses to make their main website a trash fire, their AMP version is too.

Nothing stopping a publisher doing their website right. Even with advertising: manage inventory first-party, don't track users off-site, base your ads on content.

[ec109685]

That’s not true. The specification didn’t allow docked video ads that take up 50% of the space on the page.

[lokedhs]

But if you do all that right, then what benefit does AMP serve?

[oliwarner]

To the user? Absolutely none. You can make better sites without it.

To the publisher? Originally, some twisted incentive that you'd rank higher on mobile and then globally but IIRC this no longer exists and OG data is also used. AMP is a component library too now so I guess that could simplify development if they couldn't use anything else, because HTML is so hard.

To Google? A funnel away from in-house and management at larger publishers, and ideally into one of their AMP-supported models. AML is "open" now but it's still Google, innit.

[ec109685]

Google can load an amp page instantly from a search result page since they can cache the data and pre-render before you click. No publisher can do that with their non-amp pages.

[youngtaff]

Problem is that adtech companies are extracting all the value from the news market

There seems to be a huge gap between what ad buyers pay, and what publishers receive (one study showed The Guardian got as little at 10c for each $ spent) so publishers end up adding nore ads to try to compensate

[oliwarner]

The Guardian manages [at least some of their inventory] first-party. Their products and rates are refreshingly transparent.

https://advertising.theguardian.com/

They may well use backup agencies for selling unfilled slots.

[youngtaff]

This is probably The Guardian study I was thinking of https://the-media-leader.com/where-did-the-money-go-guardian...

Says in the worst cases they only saw 30% of the revenue

Recent studies have shown even worse results for other publishers https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/how-much-publisher-revenue-...

[oliwarner]

It says that's the worst case for programmatic buys.

I don't know their business, but I suspect most of their big money ads are direct sales and they pocket the lot. It'd be interesting to break down their income by source.

[jjulius]

Speaking of AMP and ads, fun fact! If you block ads, AMP purposely ads a few second delay to load all AMP pages. So in your scenario, the winning option is to install an ad blocker and avoid all AMP pages. :)

[immibis]

[citation needed]

And this is not a swipe. This really does need a citation. It's believable, but only just.

[jjulius]

My own experience with load times as a user who blocks tons of scripts, and countless people citing it over the years. I've responded to them a bunch on HN, but here is one from 2018.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16733667

[gamblor956]

Ads pay for the content.

Do you think that journalists just work for free?

[dang]

> Do you think that journalists just work for free?

Can you please edit swipes out of your comments to HN? We're trying for a different sort of forum here, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

[ec109685]

I don’t run an ad blocker for that reason. But there’s a limit to what is reasonable: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-timothy-... https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-student-voting-...

[chaps]

Journalist here: Yes I do think that journalists often work for free. Many, many journalists work for free until they "make it". It's sadly such a competitive field that it's the only way to get paid work down the line.

Regardless though, the most-critical local reporting I know of is funded without advertisement or paywalls. Both newsroom and freelance journalism funding happens through grants. Funny enough, the orgs that I'm never able to get freelance work through are orgs that have paywalls and significant ads. Lots of gatekeeping when you have advertisers to appease.

[jjulius]

I block ads and subscribe to what I consume regularly, including journalism. The two ideas are not mutually exclusive. ;)

[paulcole]

Ads aren’t bad. They’re a way to get content without needing to exchange money for it.

The user suffer more when the content goes away.

[arrosenberg]

Exchanging money for goods and services is the entire basis of the economy. Ads force people to pay with their attention span, which seems to have serious consequences - the user is suffering from attention deficit far more than an imagined lack of content.

[paulcole]

Well if money isn’t exchanged for the service of content (in some way), the content eventually goes away. The lack of content stops being imaginary.

[immibis]

Cool. Let me pay $20/month for an ad-free Internet (not just one site). I already have Youtube Premium.

[paulcole]

This is like saying "Cool. Let me pay $10,000 for a Ferrari. I already have a tricycle."

[account42]

That content is only ever produced out of monetary motivations is the biggest lie capitalism has sold us.

[nkozyra]

> Exchanging money for goods and services is the entire basis of the economy.

Sounds like advertising meets that description.

It's a transaction of value - potential future customers via the service of advertising.

[diffeomorphism]

Sounds like it doesn't and you missed the point. There are two parties that matter: the reader and the website.

Instead of addressing that you introduced a third party, which works for the website as a service. Correct, but irrelevant.

[arrosenberg]

It does not. Attention is a limited good, not capital. Capital is capital.

[nkozyra]

You've changed your definition.

Advertising is a service, it is fundamentally no different than any other service. We may find it annoying or distasteful, but it is a natural good from natural actors in a capitalist system.

[UberFly]

You are correct overall that they are a legitimate way to trade for something with your attention but their application is so abused now. The push-back is worthwhile.

[itronitron]

Ads don't have to be bad, but most are for a variety of reasons... jarring graphics, animation, unrelated to the content. If a news organization is showing a lot of junky ads then I'm going to assume it is a failing news organization.

[tacker2000]

I get your argument, but more ads mean more intrusive JS and longer load times, which make the user experience worse. But yes, of course one needs to weigh these two sides. Free content needs to be monetized.

And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that. Seems like content creators didnt even get any of the promised benefits out of it.

[jonas21]

> And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that.

Wait, what? At the time it was introduced, it was literally the only counterbalance to the incentives of adding as many ads to your site as possible. Google has better ways of penalizing bad practices now, but that wasn't the case 7 years ago.

[Sakos]

There's a German news site (I think Zeit?) that has an interesting approach. When you try to access the site, it gives you an explicit choice (between two buttons) between the site with ads or subscribing to the site.

[dijksterhuis]

I respect being given a conscious choice up front.

NPR used to do something similar for GDPR — either accept their cookies or view the site content in plain text.

(edit: probably not in line with GDPR but heyho)

[immibis]

NPR's plaintext site is one of the best news sites ever.

Obviously, if you visit a news article and select to be redirected to plaintext, they don't redirect you to that article on the plaintext page for that article, but to the homepage, which makes it inconvenient in the hopes you won't select that option again. But once you see where to insert the article ID, it's good.

[jjulius]

Ads aren't, generally. Targeted advertising, however, is trash and needs to go away.

[ahoy]

When I joined Talking Points Memo, AMP was the new "hot" thing. I fought hard to stop us from jumping on that train and I'm glad I did.